Your Interdisciplinary Web Archive Collaboration

Web archives are intimidating. You're dealing with size and scale issues, wild formats from the live web, and just a massive amount of information to sift through. But, we can't hide our heads in the sand, and ignore it. This is our cultural heritage, and we need to make sense of it. You definitely don't want to tackle this alone, and the good news is that has been a lot of work done already, and there are a lot of great people working here. Nick Ruest will discuss the research and tools he is working on with an interdisciplinary team of collaborators from fields as varied as history, political science, sociology, and computer science to help make sense of it all.

This talk is presented by the BC Research Libraries Group.

Nick Ruest is the Digital Assets Librarian at York University, co-Principal Investigator of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded The Archives Unleashed Project, co-Principal Investigator of the SSHRC grant “A Longitudinal Analysis of the Canadian World Wide Web as a Historical Resource, 1996-2014”, and co-Principal Investigator of the Compute Canada Research Platforms and Portals Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge.

At York University, he oversees the development of data curation, asset management and preservation initiatives, along with creating and implementing systems that support the capture, description, delivery, and preservation of digital objects having significant content of enduring value. He was previously active in the Islandora and Fedora communities, serving as Project Director for the Islandora CLAW project, member of the Islandora Foundation’s Roadmap Committee and Board of Directors, and contributed code to the project. He has also served as the Release Manager for Islandora and Fedora, the moderator for the OCUL Digital Curation Community, the President of the Ontario Library and Technology Association, and President of McMaster University Academic Librarians’ Association.